


Time, As a Symptom

by tigrrmilk



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Angst, Community: rs_games, Cosmic Loneliness, M/M, R/S Games 2016, Space Stations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-24 03:52:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8355991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: R/S Games 2016 - Day 17 - Team Time“Ah,” Remus had said, as dry as he could manage. “An aristocratic youth on his grand tour.”Sirius knocked his arm. “Hey,” he said. “Grander than most, at least. You’ve got to give me that.”Seven of them go to space. One stays there.





	

**Author's Note:**

> **Team:** Time  
>  **Title:** Time, As A Symptom  
>  **Rating:** T  
>  **Warnings:** lots of discussion of canon character death  
>  **Genres:** angst, sci-fi  
>  **Word Count:** 12,000  
>  **Summary:** “Ah,” Remus had said, as dry as he could manage. “An aristocratic youth on his grand tour.”
> 
> Sirius knocked his arm. “Hey,” he said. “Grander than most, at least. You’ve got to give me that.”
> 
> Seven of them go to space. One stays there.
> 
>  **Notes:** i apologise wholeheartedly for m/any scientific errors. this story is science-fantasy rather than sci-fi rly.  
>  **Prompt:** #47 - "For time is the longest distance between two places." - Tennessee Williams

and it pains me to say, I was wrong  
love is not a symptom of time  
time is just a symptom of love

**joanna newsom - time, as a symptom of love**

 

 

 

 

 

 

⁂⁂

Remus is halfway through breakfast when the alarm system goes off for the first time. He scrapes a hand over his face and sighs and hopes that it’ll turn itself off. Maybe he’d programmed a drill and forgotten about it. Maybe --

No luck.

He looks longingly at the arti-grav machine on the kitchen wall -- and for once _not_ because it’s covered in photographs of his friends, Sirius scribbled out in the middle of all of them, a black hole around which the galaxy formed -- and then stomps away to find his spacesuit.

\---

The second time the alarm system goes off that morning, Remus realises that maybe he should check the computers _before_ he goes outside to reset it. He was never the computer guy. But he’s been out here long enough that it shouldn’t matter. Or so he tells himself.

Luckily he’s already at the computers, having given up on trying to eat his breakfast in peace. He sticks the last bite of toast in his mouth and swipes through all of the different views, trying to see what could be tripping it... _there_. He stops. It’s small, but.

He zooms in. It’s not even close. It’s a ship. Winking in and out. Light-years away. But it’s on a collision path with him if it keeps going like it’s going.

He considers trying to send a message, but he knows it’d be pointless. The station was always supposed to be here just to observe the space around it. It’s an antique. It can only broadcast messages to unknown ships by just blasting radio-waves at them and hoping they’ll get through. If the ship’s light-years away, it’ll take years for the message to reach it. And if it’s got any kind of warp technology equipped...

Besides, Remus thinks, reaching for his mug. He looks down at the grey dregs of milky tea, thinks about how unappealing it looks, and downs it anyway. He pulls a face. _Cold_. When your worst-case scenario has happened, and then things that are so bad that you couldn’t have even thought of them in advance to make them your worst-case scenario happen as well... It kind of stops you from worrying so much. He’s still here. The worst has happened. He’s lost everyone. He thinks about what would have happened if someone had been caught on the approach, unannounced, in that first year onboard... and then, well. He swallows down the thought and associated memories. Hard.

\---

The third time the alarm starts he’s only just back in from resetting it the second time, and he’s still wearing most of the spacesuit. “Come on!” He yells, arms thrust up as if the ship, many light-years away, can see him here, in a little landing dock, helmet only half-twisted off. It turns out that this is what he cares about -- not the possibility of approaching hostiles, not the possibility of being under attack. Just the fact that the alarm system he installed is going to deafen him or drive him insane before he’s even got around to eating lunch.

He finishes taking the helmet off and stalks over to the deck with all the computers. The screens are half-focused on the area he saw the ship earlier -- empty -- and half-focused on the ship itself. He works out from the co-ordinates how fast it’s moving.

Not as fast as he could have feared. But quickly. It must have some kind of warper installed, although probably quite an old one, as he’s got a good lock on it right now and it seems to be drifting. Between jumps, maybe.

This time when Remus resets the alarm system he carefully cuts some of the wires. This should make it quieter. He can replace them later. He remembers Sirius -- also not the computer guy -- saying to him, near the start of their time up here, when the alarm had been triggered by some debris blowing past for the second time in a fortnight, “Why can’t we just turn it off at the computer?”

“Systems have to be totally separate,” James had said, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, frowning at the way the computer was registering the debris. “Come on, you came top in Station Regs.”

“It just doesn’t seem fair to make you go out there for it all the time,” Sirius had said.

Peter -- the computer guy -- had shoved James out of the way a bit and said “Look, you need to type in here and press this and then maybe...” and Remus didn’t know how to make the moment last, so he’d pulled his helmet on and smiled apologetically at Sirius as if he’d done something wrong, as if he’d upset him.

“It won’t take long,” he’d said, clapping at his own chest to make sure he’d connected his comms system. “You can hear me, right?”

Sirius gave him a thumbs up. “Yes,” he said. But all Remus could hear, even back then, was the siren from his own alarm system, screaming through his head. The only noise the helmets couldn’t block out. He made an indeterminate gesture back at Sirius and then moved. He had a job to do.

“Someone else needs to make sure they’re hooked up to comms too,” Remus said, as he closed the airlock. “It’s all very well if you can hear me, but if something goes wrong --”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sirius said, right into his ear, and Remus stopped himself from squirming at the unexpected intimacy of it. He’d expected James, O glorious captain. Not... “I’m here. Go and fix the problem before you make Peter’s migraine any worse. Talk me through it if it helps.”

It didn’t help. Not really. But he did it anyway. “You’ve still not been out here, have you?” He said, clipping himself into the alcove surrounding the big alarm box. He turned his head back, just for a few seconds, but it overtook him, as he always did, and he had to shake himself to make him get back to work. “I bet you’ve never seen this many stars. You need to see it one day. From out here.” Sirius was surprisingly squeamish when it came to spacewalks. But Remus thought he could wear him down. Wanted to wear him down.

“I’m on the deck right now,” Sirius said. “I’ve got a better view of space than you do.”

“But not this many stars,” Remus reiterated, flipping the switches in a complicated sequence. He remembers it by rhythm, still. If he forgets, he can always remember again by tapping his own fingers on the side of the hollow casing and thinking of his mum’s favourite song. _Sue me, sue me, shoot bullets through me --_

“Not as many stars,” Sirius agreed, even though like -- it wasn’t like he had anything to compare it against. He just trusted Remus. The deck’s lights were bright, and they were facing the other direction, and... Remus knew. Remus know what it looked like in there. Not enough stars. Not like this.

\---

This whole thing -- the whole alarm-going-off, Remus-going-on-a-spacewalk-to-fix-it-thing -- was one of the memories that Remus had liked to wrap around himself, way way back at the start. One of the moments of talking with Sirius -- talking about basically nothing, comfortably, while getting on with some work. One of the moments when he felt like -- I could know this person. We could --

Remus had never had many friends. Even in the accelerated training programme for the mission -- he’d sometimes gone for a drink with Lily, but that was about it. He didn’t even feel particularly shy! He’d just... somehow it hadn’t happened. And now here he was, the whole of space whirring around him. And on the other end of the comms line...

“Getting on okay?” Sirius asked. Remus laughed.

“Yeah, yeah. Alarm stopped yet?”

“Yes,” Sirius said. “So, um, you can come back in. Whenever you want.”

“You sound so commanding, I can’t think why you’re not captain,” Remus said, and laughed again when Sirius made a small, offended noise. “Okay, okay. Airlock three.”

\---

Remus prints out diagrams of the changes he made to the alarm system on the sticker printer that afternoon, sitting cross-legged on the ground and eating a lunch of instant noodles and rehydrated fungus as each sticker slowly trawls out. Almost everything they print out is a sticker here -- in case arti-grav ever fails, documents need to be secured down. If it’s not big enough to bind into a book and tie to a shelf in the library...

Almost everything _he_ prints out is a sticker, that is. Not _they_. Because he’s alone, and has been alone for a long time.

\---

He sticks the new alarm arrangements everywhere necessary -- by the computers, in the maintenance lab, in the airlocks -- and then rubs his hands together to get rid of any sticky residue. Today was supposed to be his _day off_. Not that it has much meaning anymore. His most recent crew left a year ago and they’d only been here on a lightning rotation before they were sent on to a bigger station the other side of the system. It’s funny how in not even a decade and a half he’s gone from being part of a new type of expedition -- a crucial member, a pioneer -- to someone who just kind of helps kids in the stage when they’ve finished earth training but aren’t quite ready for space on their own yet.

We didn’t have any of that, he thinks. Somebody has to be first -- but. He wishes it hadn’t been them. He wishes, and tells himself off for wishing. He can’t go back. Nobody can go back, but especially not him.

And the thing about insisting that you’ll be okay on your own is -- you have to then be happy enough to work on your own. If the airlocks stop working, the arti-grav gets too strong or too weak, or the plants in the nursery start dying, he has to go ahead and fix the problem without any backup.

“Why don’t you want to go back?” one of the most recent crew had asked him, a couple of days before they were due to leave. They’d been in the nursery, gathering clippings to take with them. She had close-cropped hair that had been dyed pink at the start of her time up here, but the colour had slowly been shorn off, revealing ash-brown underneath. “Or move on?”

Remus had shrugged. The truth was, he had been back once. To _earth_ , which is what she meant. Three or so years in, he’d spent six months back on earth. But somebody always needed to be here, or they’d decommission the station. And it’s not like there was anything left for him down there, now. At three years he’d thought, maybe... But, no. Besides -- no matter how good the arti-grav (and it is good - Remus had made modifications to it himself, and Sirius had helped, and whatever else he’d done he’d been good at that) there’s something strange and wrong about leaving it behind for the real thing. He’d felt too long-limbed, too heady, away in the clouds. He’d been away for so long that he’d changed, possibly irrevocably... everything was too loud and bright. And besides.

“How old do you think I am,” he asked her. “I know you can access my file anytime you want, but don’t. Right now, disregarding anything you know. How old do you think I am?”

She stared at him. Not anxious about the question, just not-knowing what the point of it was. “I don’t know,” she said, as if that wasn’t why he was asking. “You’ve been up here twelve years, so I’d guess you’re in your mid-forties.”

He laughed. “I’m thirty-four,” he said. “I’ve never really known much else.” He didn’t say -- that’s what having difficult parents and no money gets you. He didn’t say, I’d barely finished my degree when they sent us up here. He didn’t say, they had to be quick and go with a couple of genius hotshots and then a larger group of people nobody much cared about because they thought it was their only chance...

“God, you’re only a few years older than me,” she said, followed by “I didn’t mean...” But he waved her off.

“I know, that’s why I asked you to guess,” he said. “Don’t fret.”

He’s sure they’re better at it all now. He’s sure they get more years of training; that they don’t send them up six months into the programme because they’re trying to prove something, to beat a new series of international laws. “It feels like my home now,” he said. “Besides. I don’t have to pay rent. And all my stuff is here.”

All his stuff: scribbled-over photographs, some battered books.

\---

Messages from earth are few and far between, which isn’t surprising. There’s a better system in place than the radio blasts he can use to try and talk to approaching ships, but it’s jittery and unreliable ( _I could fix that_ , he thinks, but he doesn’t even try) and there’s not much to say and no guarantee that anyone will bother to reply, since he’s on lowest priority now. That afternoon he’s on the communications computer, mostly because it’s the one he can access all the media on board through and he feels like watching some old TV, when a handful of messages flash through. The alarm has started to go off again, but he’s ignoring it now that it’s quiet enough to be ignored. Every time he looks at the navigation and security machines they yell at him too, but the ship still isn’t even close. It’s drifting... until suddenly it isn’t. And then it reappears, at different coordinates. Closer. Drifting again. He can’t do anything about it. Maybe it will completely miss him. Maybe the warper is about to break. He’s alone, and he’s not a fighter. This isn’t a space war. It’s just an anomaly in space that he can’t engage with yet, that he doesn’t know anything about.

The messages aren’t about another expedition coming to him. They also aren’t about closing the station down, which is the message he dreads the most. There are enough provisions up here to last for another couple of decades for a full crew, and on his own he could easily spend the rest of his life up here, as long as every now and then they think to send him some new books and copies of whichever films made the cover of Sight & Sound. The messages seem to be about the ship. They describe its current location and path, and then... DO NOT ENGAGE, they say. SITUATION IS UNDER CONTROL. TEMPORARY DISABLING OF ALARM SYSTEM RECOMMENDED.

Thanks, Remus thinks.

There’s no name signing the messages off, so he’s not sure who he’s talking to. Is Peter back at work? Peter always liked to communicate in all-caps, even though James liked to stress to him that the system was sophisticated enough that they didn’t have to write messages in the style of telegrams from a hundred years ago. It’s probably just whichever random lackey is handling his station as an afterthought.

“Understood,” he types back. “Is the ship one of yours?”

YES AND NO, the reply says. TRUST ME. IT’LL BE FINE.

Remus quirks a smile at that. He always likes when he gets a sense of the person at the other end. Also, he’s pretty sure this isn’t Peter. “It reads like you’re trying to reassure me,” he says. “But you’re achieving the opposite effect.”

OH NO, they reply. PLEASE DON’T PANIC.

“I’m not panicking,” he types. “I trust you. Who am I talking to?”

RON WEASLEY, the person on earth types. There’s a pause during which Remus thinks that either the system is going wrong or Ron’s boss has appeared and told him to stop sending such unconvincing messages.

PETTIGREW SAYS HE’S GOT YOUR BACK, a message finally comes through. Remus blanches and turns away from the screen. Good, he thinks. Thanks for reminding me.

\---

The first thing Remus does after Ron Weasley (when did they stop using military titles instead of first names, he thinks, despite the fact that he’s not and never has been military) stops messaging him is blast a message at the approaching ship. It’s steadily getting closer, although still a fair number of light-years away... he briefly considers working out if he can rig the ship’s two outwards-facing communications systems together and try to talk to the ship directly, but if he fucks it up then he’ll be left with nothing. He just has to make sure the blaster’s at the right angle, and if the ship keeps steadily moving forwards than at some point it should pick him up.

Because, the thing is -- earth can tell him not to engage, but he’s the one who is going to be hit if he doesn’t. They can tell him not to panic, and he doesn’t. But he’s under no illusions that he has anyone or anything to count on here other than himself, his own space-station, the things he has made and fixed.

He picks up the mic and rattles off all the boring stuff -- codes, information about who he is, where the station is -- and asks the ship to adjust its course to avoid collision. He then has to reel off _more_ codes for the direct to-earth-messaging system that they can try and tap into if they have the right equipment, and codes that should allow the ship to directly talk to the station’s operating system if the ship gets close by and needs to dock for emergency repairs, etc. It doesn’t leave much space in Remus’s brain for him to be welcoming, or interesting. Remus briefly remembers that this kind of message was supposed to be automated -- that he and James had been working on it when everything had gone to shit.

There’s a lot that he’s never done. In thirteen years, you’d maybe think he could have solved any problem, any unfinished piece of business that he had left. But Remus finds that when he’s alone and unobserved he reverts to doing what’s necessary and not a lot else. He reads a lot -- he’s almost finished the vast reams of romance novels and spy thrillers the last lot left behind in exchange for Peter’s old Boys’ Adventure books that Remus had trying to been offload since the start of the mission, back when Peter was still onboard -- and he thinks about things, and tries not to dwell on the past too much, and he spends time tending to the plants. He was never one of the geniuses. He was sent out here because nobody would miss him much, because there was nobody to object. He’s allowed to have turned out to be nothing special, he thinks. He’s survived, and it’s more than anybody expected, and it’s more than he deserved. He survived when so many of them didn’t.

At the end of his message, he hesitates, and says. “I hope you’re not hostile.” He leaves it at that. He presses a few buttons, and the blaster whirrs and gets to work.

\---

You don’t send a crew of people barely out of adolescence up to space with six-months’ training without some disasters happening along the way.

They’d hoped that nothing _too_ bad would happen. That was the best they could have hoped for. It turned out to be naive to hope for even that -- but Remus remembers the feeling. The hope. Laughing as he worked on the arti-grav machine, talking to Sirius and Lily about total nonsense as he worked on air filtration and the oxygen generator as if their lives didn’t all depend on it.

He remembers the earlier disasters -- mostly he remembers the time he was almost cut adrift, the time he thought he was dead, due to a combination of small errors that nobody should have made but nobody could stop themselves from making... and then how Sirius had done everything he could, risking his own life, to pull him back in. That was... six months in. Only a year after the start of training, hundreds of light-years away, and at that point they hadn’t even reached their final destination yet; their station was still hurtling through space and engaging the warper intermittently while they slept.

Not that the time meant much here, except -- they needed some kind of system. They needed something to work with. To track themselves, and each other. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months... they were as good as anything else. They were familiar. The light systems on the space station mimicked orbit, and a daily cycle of light - tried to make their bodies believe they were on earth or some other planet.

“It doesn’t feel like I’ve only known you for a year,” Sirius said. The day after Remus had almost died, shaking. It wasn’t cold; Remus’s work on the heating system was solid, good. He seemed to spend every day, back then, fixing some system or other. Improving it. But not this day, and not the day before. Sirius was lying on Remus’s bed, next to Remus. Every time he moved closer Remus moved slightly back, scared of what it meant, and he was now half-dangling off, a breath away from falling. Something was going to have to give.

When Sirius had pulled Remus in, and Remus could barely breathe, his suit had been smothering him, and Sirius kept saying “Are you okay? Talk to me!” and all Remus could do was breathe in big, choking gasps, because his system had started to shut down and he’d been out there for _hours_ being thrown around, being thrown farther and farther out, and he could barely see, it was like his eyes had been burnt out of his head -- and then he slowly came to and he was lying on the floor of the kitchen instead of the clinic because it was closer to the airlock, his helmet torn off and the rest of the suit half-undone, revealing that underneath it he was wearing slightly dirty red leggings and a long-sleeved t-shirt covered in little stars that had once been glittery before the industrial space station washing routine got to them. And Sirius was there, looming over him, and standing over Remus prone on the floor was the only way he _could_ loom, as he was tiny and Remus was so big, always felt so big next to him. At this distance Remus could barely make him out from all of the details; any further away and it would have been like he didn’t exist. He could see the brown in Sirius’s eyelashes and his skin looked dewy with sweat and there were pricks of dark hair coming in over his chin and the lower parts of his cheeks and that -- that was all there was. This expanse -- this face, close enough to just be a collection of parts. Sirius closed his eyes for a second -- too long for a blink -- and Remus felt it. He felt the movement, a whole face again. Feeling. Remus coughed again. “I’m here,” he said. “You.” Sirius was holding his hand, and he hadn’t noticed. Not until right this second. But other people were there, and they came closer at the sound of Remus’s voice.

“Somebody needs to carry him to the clinic,” Peter said. “Not you, Sirius. James is bigger.” Remus found himself carried between the two of them, in the end, and then he didn’t remember what had happened until he woke up in the clinic, alone, and then he woke up again and it was the next day and he was in his bed, and Sirius was sitting next to him, and he looked like shit, and Remus said:

“You need to sleep.”

Sirius laughed, and a while later he gingerly climbed into the bed next to Remus, saying “Is this okay, I’m so sorry, I thought I’d,” and Remus didn’t know what to say. Sirius felt warm, and Remus wanted to turn around and bury himself in him. But he couldn’t move. He couldn’t make himself do it. His heart jumped. And finally, when it was either give in or be pushed out...

“You don’t have to feel guilty,” he said. His voice sounded alien, like it wasn’t him speaking. “You don’t -- you don’t have to do this just because you think it’ll make me feel better.”

He pushed.

He thought -- he barely thought. He felt confused and heavy. He didn’t let himself think about what it was that he wanted. He was too tired for that anyway.

Of course it was the wrong thing to say. Who hasn’t said the wrong thing over and over again? Remus saw it in his face then, and now he wonders when he can’t stop himself from wondering what else was there. What there was that he hadn’t been able to read, behind the hurt. Sirius left, and Remus had his whole thin single bed to himself. He’d sometimes wondered about those; did command think that they’d each only ever sleep alone? Did they think they _were_ children, these young astronauts, and that they deserved nothing better? Because they weren’t children, even if it feels like that when he looks back from more than a decade on.

Sometimes Remus likes sleeping alone; he’s grown pretty used to it. But even now, he sometimes thinks, in the split second between sleep and wakefulness -- is somebody else there?

\---

It had been another year after that before everything else had gone wrong. The cracks had started to show long, long before then. Maybe the first of them had been in Remus’s bed; no, no, that’s not right. It feels like it must be, because the rest of the pain, that calamity, fades in comparison. But the first crack was -- the disaster. When Remus almost died because his comrades hadn’t taken enough care; because he, himself, hadn’t taken enough care. When Remus was only saved by Sirius doing something risky and stupid.

\---

The exchange of short messages with command reminds Remus of those long, torturous days spent doing nothing much but sleeping, being interrogated by the remnants of his crew and command, and trying to fix the mess they had made of his station.

He woke up each morning and thought: James and Lily are dead.

He woke up each morning and thought: Peter and Sirius are gone.

He woke up each morning and the only people left were Alice and Frank, who’d once been his friends and now were nothing like it, didn’t know how to be, and Snape, who said nothing at all.

He prefers it now. He prefers that he’s alone; he prefers that nobody cares. He doesn’t miss the days of trying to put all the pieces together. He doesn’t miss the days of realising that -- they’d been wrong. There wasn’t just a corporate spy onboard to steal secrets for a rival space agency. There had been a traitor onboard whose job had been to sabotage the mission. To -- to destroy it, and them. Alice and Frank had been recalled a few weeks later, and for a year it had just been -- Remus and Severus. The mechanic and the doctor.

Or rather, across the vast expanses of time and space, that year reduces to this: Snape had hung around for long enough to help Remus deal with the aftermath of the accident, and then he’d left too. Remus had been supposed to come with him, but at the last minute he decided to stay. “You’ll lose the station if I go,” he said to command when they tried to argue with him. “It needs repairs. The autopilot can’t manage without someone overseeing it.” Snape, at least, was soon convinced. Or rather, he didn’t need convincing. At this point, he didn’t care. He’d been chosen to travel to space with his best friend; she was dead now, and as far as he was concerned he might as well have been too.

“On your own head be it,” he’d said, and Remus never saw him again.

Most days were good, and Remus was grateful. Most days, he was fine on his own. The days when he wasn’t? When he couldn’t get out of bed because he was sad or sick or sick with sadness? The station had some automated functions. He could talk to it. It had not learned to talk back; that had been going to come later. That had been a project for him and Peter and James and Sirius, together.

They had been pioneers. That had been the goal. Remus and Peter had worked on the ship; Alice and Frank were astronomers, explorers, observers, Lily a botanist with a taste for pure maths and quantum theory, and Snape was their doctor. James and Sirius as Captain and Lieutenant with serious theoretical physics backgrounds (“You finished your degree at Oxford when you were _how_ old?” Remus asked Sirius, once, and then felt sorry for him when he confirmed the answer) were able to flit around between station crew and science crew as they saw fit.

It had worked until it hadn’t.

They had not finished constructing the ship’s AI in the time that they had -- it wasn’t. It wasn’t long enough, it wasn’t long enough for anything.

Maybe Sirius had been holding them back, instead of helping.

Remus still can’t make it work when he thinks back on it. The pieces fit together poorly. At first he wasn’t looking for it. But even when he was... even when he knew someone might not be on side. He thinks. Why would Sirius go to all that effort to save him? Why would Sirius sabotage their mission by killing his best friend, whom he’d known since early childhood? They’d been so excited to go to space together. And yet...

“So what if there’s a corporate spy,” Lily had said to Remus once, over rehydrated yoghurt (it’s best not to think about it, Remus thinks), and then pointed at him with her spoon. “That does _not_ mean I’m the spy.”

“Never suspected for a second,” Remus said.

Lily sucked at her spoon, and then said, “So what, once the mission’s over they’ll tell some rival company all about it? Big deal. Send more people up. Build more stations.”

Remus thought about this a lot. If only.

Even though the AI had never been finished, never given a voice, the station can still respond to him when he needs it to. They’d achieved that much. It talks to him in its own way. Lights flare in the ceiling. “Breakfast to B-21,” he could say, croaking. The dumbwaiter in his bedroom wall, within easy reach of his bed, would tremble, and then -- there. Dried cereal, rehydrating itself in a bowl of cold milk, the treatment of which he did _not_ want to think about. A cold metal spoon.

And tea, and tea, and tea. Half of the food stores must just be tea, Remus thinks. He hopes. He can’t stand the idea of running out. If anything could drive him back to earth...

Back, back. He can’t go back. There’s nothing left. The place isn’t the thing. Earth is nothing. It was the people. It was thirteen years ago, that first day in space, feeling surprisingly cold and heavy-handed from it as he tried to work out the thermostat. Sirius, who he soon learned always ran hot, had taken his hand between his. They’d met before, of course, but only a handful of times outside of training. Nothing like this. Earth was quickly receding. “I’m helping, yeah?” Sirius had asked, and he pressed his hands into Remus’s so gently, and that there, _there_ was the moment that the cracks had started to form, because Remus’s heart hurt in his chest, against his ribs.

He was 22, and Sirius was beautiful, and he didn’t seem to care that Remus was just the mechanic and that as the second-in-command he, Sirius, probably had more important things to do than help him tinker with the thermostat and various other small systems that Remus hadn’t had the chance to get his hands on yet.

“Yes,” he’d said, finally. “You could also help by picking up the weird screwdriver. No, not that. Opal handle. Yes, thank you.”

\---

If it was a normal day, Remus would be sleeping. As it is, the failsafe alarm system -- the alarm system for when a ship is close enough to be imminently dangerous, and hasn’t yet called in -- has just started. It’s midnight -- or, it’s Remus’s midnight, and nobody else’s. Who knows if the ship is manned, and if it is, who knows what time it is for them? Not everyone has to observe that kind of structure out here. Remus doesn’t put the suit on, doesn’t trip any switches, doesn’t cut any wires. He sits down at the comms system and puts the radio on blast again.

He rattles off the numbers. He rattles off the instructions. And then he breathes in.

“You are approximately sixty minutes away. Please send word as to your purpose. Please state your name and destination, or immediately adjust your course. You are currently on a collision course with Deep Space Station Blue: Persephone. I repeat, you are on a collision course with the Persephone. Please adjust your course.”

Remus doesn’t have a functioning shuttle. There had originally been four, doubling as escape vessels and exploration vehicles for the scientists, as everybody onboard was a skilled, qualified pilot, but one had been damaged in the accident -- it wasn’t an accident, he knows, he knew almost immediately after it had happened, and yet he still calls it that, _The Accident_ , although it’s not like he talks about it anywhere outside his head -- and the other three had gone with the various waves of people leaving. Each new crew brought three working shuttles with them, and then left in them when they went.

I’ll be fine, Remus had told command, at the point when he told them he wasn’t leaving. _I can fix this one. The damaged one that’s left. Am I, or am I not, the mechanic who’s kept this station operational for the past two years?_

But like many things that Remus could have fixed over the years if he’d put his mind to it; he had chosen not to put his mind to it. It’s too late now.

“Please state your name and purpose,” he repeats, hollow. It doesn’t matter. Either there will be a collision, or there won’t. There are no weapons onboard. They were only ever scientists, in the middle of nowhere. Lily had argued against them the most fiercely, while they were readying the station and trying to load a heavy, volatile payload. “We don’t want anyone -- if there is anyone, and I think there’s nobody out there, not where we’re going -- to see us as a threat.”

He repeats the docking codes into the mic one last time, and then he stops pressing the blast button, and can hear nothing but the rattling of the aircon and blood whorling in his ears.

\---

The ship does not respond. It does not adjust its course.

\---

Remus makes himself a last meal of the best things that are still left on the station. Astronaut ice cream (which astronauts never used to eat, but Remus’s generation had all grown up with it and lobbied for it to be included in their rations), two freshly-made soft white rolls filled with three rolls’ worth of dried ham each, chocolate. Tea. He pads around the living areas - he usually leaves everywhere here that isn’t his room well alone, but. Well. James and Lily’s rooms are the same as they always were. There’s a book on Lily’s bed... she’d left it upside down there instead of putting a bookmark in, and at some point over the past decade and change it had been shaken off, away. But it had been face-down for so long that it’s bent open... he can see exactly where she was. Well. Not exactly. Somewhere in those two pages. Remus picks it up but can’t take any of the words in.

James’s room is fucking messy. It infuriated Lily, Remus remembers. Official books chained to one of the walls. A lot of half-eaten food Remus can’t believe hasn’t rotted away yet. He should have tided it up, he guesses -- should have done this, should have done that.

Sirius’s room is next, but Remus doesn’t have the heart for it, not even now. He doesn’t know what he’d find there. He’s afraid to look. Books Sirius had stolen from him and Lily? Clothes? Photographs of his little brother, and none of the rest of his family?

Peter’s room is neat. He doesn’t bother going in. Peter isn’t dead, or locked up. He was grievously injured. And now he’s better, he supposes. That’s all. If any of it mattered, he would have asked for one of the returning missions to bring it with them.

The station is big enough that none of the returning crews have needed the cabins... they have taken Alice’s, Frank’s, Severus’s... and many of the other rooms which were empty for that first mission. He’s grateful. He’s grateful that the commanders have not demanded the captain’s room.

He also knows that these ghosts -- these memorials -- are part of why he has just been allowed to stay here to rot. But apparently nothing rots in space. Not James’s old food. And not Remus. Not yet.

It’s been a good run.

\---

The ship is very close now. Still no response. Remus heavily starts to type a message to earth.

> Ship still on course. You probably know that. No word, have been trying to speak to them. Sorry, I know you said not to engage, but it seemed better than just waiting for my death.

> Possibility that it’s unmanned?

>>> WE SUSPECT IT IS A MANNED VESSEL.

>>> REMUS, IT’S PETER. I KNOW THERE ARE NO WEAPONS ONBOARD, BUT THERE SHOULD BE PLENTY OF FLARES LEFT. THERE ARE SOME IN THE DAMAGED SHUTTLE. AND SOME IN THE GENERAL SUPPLIES STORE.

Remus stares at the screen for a second. “Yes.” He types that out. It feels inadequate. He sends it anyway.

>>> YOU CAN HIT THE SHIP WITH THEM. IT’S A FOUR-PASSENGER SHUTTLE. THE SAME AS THE ONES THAT CAME WITH THE PERSEPHONE.

>>> DOING THIS WILL GIVE YOU A CHANCE.

>>> WE HAVE REASON TO SUSPECT THAT THE APPROACHING VESSEL IS HOSTILE.

Remus pinches the skin between his eyebrows. Because of course, the station _had_ come with weapons. So, the thing is that fire needs oxygen to burn (or some other kind of gas... Remus is not a chemist and doesn’t really understand the finer details). Flares as they’re known on earth don’t... work in space. In the vacuum. So. The flares onboard the Persephone are actually bombs that hone in on matter and that generate their own cloud of oxygen. And then. And then... they go... boom. They are technically meant to be thrown at space debris, but Remus is pretty sure they were included for the most part as backup weaponry when the crew had voted against standard munitions. He’d had a couple of flares on him when he’d almost been lost, that time many years ago -- but what was he supposed to do with them? Blow up part of the station? It might have alerted them sooner to the fact that he was dangerously close to being sucked out into space, but it would have also blown up part of the station and could have killed other members of the crew. Or... If the station’s external fortifications were good enough to withstand it (hopeful) then what? It would have stood a very strong chance of killing Remus, of blinding him, of burning him away to nothing. He had no conception of how big the combustion cloud was, would be. How had any of them survived the fire that took Lily and James?

Remus stares at the screen. He feels that it’s useless, at this point, to remind Peter how James and Lily died. Peter had almost died, too. And he’s still suggesting that Remus -- that Remus should do this.

> I don’t think so, Peter.

Remus swipes the window away. To hell with it. The idea that his last conversation ever might have been with Peter Pettigrew over the communications-to-earth-pipeline sours in his mouth.

And whose fault is that, Remus thinks.

Not for the first time, he reminds himself that James and Lily would not have told him to stay out here, by himself. That they would have said -- get over it. Do something else.

But, he thinks. I didn’t want to. And that’s the truth of it. _I was never able to work it out_ , he thinks. Maybe he once thought that staying here would help him make sense of what went wrong. But it didn’t, it doesn’t. All that’s happened is that the station has become his home, and it hasn’t solved anything, and nothing has become better, and he doesn’t want to leave.

So come if you’re going to come, he thinks. He won’t touch the flares. He couldn’t do anything for James and Lily or even for Peter, not back then. But he can do this. He can choose not to be aggressive. He can choose to -- not do it again. Maybe this _is_ it, he thinks.

Maybe this is where it ends.

Okay.

\---

It doesn’t end. Or; it’s not that kind of ending.

\---

The shuttle pulls up to the station and transmits the docking codes in binary. No more, no less. Remus holds his hands up to the computer, and he accepts it. He lets it dock. He lets it board.

\---

It’s not an ending.

\---

Remus downs the last of his tea, and makes his way over to Shuttle Dock #3. It’s where the shuttle that Peter flew back to earth left from, he thinks. For all of his memories, he does not remember that. Remus missed the accident -- of course he did, he always missed everything important. But he was there for the aftermath. He was there to try and salvage his friends when there was nothing left to save. He almost died, again, and this time Sirius was not there to pull him back in. It was Snape. Override codes. Suited up. Flashing red eyes. “They’re gone,” he said. He’d pushed Remus to the floor. “This is not what your suit is made for. And this corner of the ship is breached. You know that. You need to seal the airlock before it kills us all.”

It was the longest conversation they’d ever had, and all Remus said was: “I know. I know that.” Surprised. Numb.

It wasn’t until Snape pulled Remus’s suit off that Remus realised that something he’d collided with out there had been a remnant of the flare, and it had melted part of the suit to the left side of his body, and he’d frozen where he hadn’t burned. He hadn’t felt the burning. He hadn’t noticed the breach. It had come so close to puncturing; to getting to the air supply; to finally, finally, killing him.

He had lived.

He had sealed that airlock off. He had sealed the hole in the shuttle. He had made everything safe. And then Snape had dressed his wounds, and neither of them spoke, and it felt like they would never speak again.

\---

Remus picks up a kitchen knife and stalks over to where the shuttle has docked. Just because he doesn’t want to bomb it out of existence doesn’t mean he trusts anyone or anything that might be in it. He’s cautious, slow. And then -- there it is. In a split-second he registers that it isn’t just the same kind of shuttle as the ones that had originally been stationed at the Persephone -- it _is_ one of the Persephone’s shuttles. Back. Back for him? It has the intricate paintwork that Lily had worked on when she was bored out of her mind one afternoon by Severus and James having a big fight in the nursery, and she needed to get away. Remus had helped. It’s not a big shuttle. He thinks wildly, for a second -- was there -- did somebody hit the wrong button? Did it just come home? He thinks -- why didn’t it send any communications? And then.

The shuttle door swings up, and Sirius Black half-stumbles, half-falls out. He takes one look at Remus from where he’s in a heap on the floor and says, “Oh, hell. I’m hallucinating again,” and he closes his eyes and presses his head into his knees.

\---

“Hallucinating,” Remus says, after a long moment. He’s glad he has the knife, but he doesn’t really know what to do. With it, with anything. Sirius doesn’t seem very threatening, just sitting on the floor.

“Either that or I’m seeing ghosts,” Sirius says, muffled, into his own legs. He’s very small. Smaller than Remus remembers. His hair is long and streaked with white. Remus thinks quickly -- he must be, what? Barely 35?

But then, Remus knows about ageing early.

“Sirius Black,” Remus says, as if he’s an impatient school teacher. “I am real, and unless I am hallucinating things _you_ are also real. I’m giving you five seconds to explain what’s going on or I’m going to have to put you into your shuttle and send you back to Earth myself.”

It’s hard to know what to do. He looks at him and he knows he should think -- he killed them. He killed James, he killed Lily. But he thinks the words and can’t feel them. It feels so... far, far away. Even though it had happened here. On this station. And Remus hadn’t been able to stop it.

Remus flexes his hand on the knife, almost unconsciously. He can’t think.

Sirius looks up at him, eyes wide and dark. He shakes his head. “No,” he says, and then seems to think better of it. His voice is hoarse.

“Peter,” he says. “Peter lied.”

“What do you mean,” Remus says, slowly.

“Peter,” Sirius says. He ran a hand through his hair. “God, you really do look like a ghost. For a second I thought --”

“It may surprise you to learn that I do not get much chance to catch the sun,” Remus says. “Not up here.”

“He lied about everything,” Sirius says, pulling the conversation back to -- he closes his eyes again. “I don’t know how to make you trust me. But I came here to get -- I thought. I thought there was nobody here. I just wanted to collect his things. The evidence.” He’s still on the floor. Pressing his head into his legs, and resolutely not looking up.

“What did he lie about,” Remus says. “Please. Tell me.”

“He was the _corporate spy_ ,” Sirius says, and he sneers as he says the words. It’s not a pleasant expression, but it makes Remus’s heart beat faster. It’s so -- familiar. And it’s so -- innate. Unthinking. Remus -- for the first time in a long time -- wonders. “He still is. Please help me. Nobody else knows, and --”

Neither of them says anything. Sirius breathes in. “He killed them,” he says. Yes, Remus thinks. I thought that’s what you meant.

Remus reaches for Sirius’s hand and helps him up. He looks him over. He can’t tell if Sirius is shaking or if _he’s_ shaking.

“You’re right,” he says. “I don’t trust you.” And then he jerks his head towards the rest of the station. “Show me. Please.”

\---

“So what?” Sirius says, as he sorts through all the things Peter left behind, looking for -- whatever evidence there is that he thinks he left behind. “You’re alone, here. You’ve chosen to stay for all these years.”

“I went home for a while,” Remus says. By _home_ he means _earth_. “I didn’t like it so much. Besides, I’m only alone when they’re between missions. I’ve had a lot of crews here.”

“Do you spend more time alone, or more time with other people?” Sirius asks. Remus doesn’t answer, and Sirius has the grace to finally say, “It’s not like I can talk.”

Sirius sifts through paperwork, looks through Peter’s books... he finds nothing. Remus feels both taken in by the apparent sincerity of his search and a growing worry about the fact that there’s nothing. If Sirius is lying, why bother? Why come all this way to find something that doesn’t exist? Does he want to kill him, finish off the job? It’s not like killing Remus will achieve anything. Everything that happened -- happened. It was a million years ago, or it might as well have been.

Remus can’t believe Sirius is on his station. That he could reach out and touch him. Bury a hand in his hair.

He doesn’t do that, of course. But he could.

“What happened?” Remus asks, as gently as he can. “I can’t believe you if you don’t tell me.”

Sirius stares at him hollowly. “I don’t,” he says. He shakes his head. “You deserve an explanation, but I don’t have it in me. I just came to find...” He is close to despair, Remus can hear it. Or...? His voice is different, some of his mannerisms are different. But his mouth moves the same way, he bares his teeth when talking...

Remus stands up. “I was in contact with command about you,” he says. “I should probably tell them that I haven’t been destroyed.” Sirius looks unconcerned, as it’s not like command can actually do anything without coming out here themselves, until Remus says “... of course, the person I was talking to was Peter, who it sounds like you think probably doesn’t care if I’m alive or not.”

Sirius blanches and rubs across his eyes with his knuckles. “Fuck,” he says. He looks up at him. “He knew it was me -- what did he say to you?”

“Nothing,” Remus says. “Told me not to engage. Well -- and then he told me to blow you up with the flares.”

Sirius laughs. “That’s what he did,” he says. “He was -- he wanted to sabotage the shuttles, all but one of them. Make it so the mission wasn’t safe anymore, and they’d have to send a rescue mission to send us all home and leave the station unmanned...” he pauses, and presses a hand to his forehead. “He was going to use the last shuttle himself -- and bring one of us in as his scapegoat. Get a promotion up the ranks, and help out our rivals at the same time.”

“You,” Remus says.

“Me,” Sirius agrees. Sirius had been the most vocally dissatisfied with a lot of the regulations, a lot of the faults in their programme... and he had also taken a keen interest in the ship’s mechanics which had led to him working in close-quarters with Remus, asking him lots of technical questions. At the time Remus had thought -- hoped -- it was that he wanted an excuse. To be close to him. To talk to him. “Come on, let me help,” he’d say, and sit cross-legged on the floor as Remus fixed a sticky door, ran diagnostics on a shuttle’s controls. It was as close as they could get without Remus freaking out, without it all going wrong. Sirius handing Remus a screwdriver, a drill, their hands maybe touching. Remus looks back on it now, and wonders. Is that what Peter saw? Did he decide to turn Sirius’s interest in the ship into Sirius learning how to sabotage it? Did he twist the truth?

Did he decide Sirius was the most obvious spy? The brilliant second-in-command, the best friend, the malcontent? Something about him didn’t fit, it never had. Did Peter push that? Do everything he could to make it seem that he had done the unthinkable?

“But he was half blown-up,” Remus says. Sirius grimaces.

“It wasn’t as bad as it looked,” he says. “He lost a finger, the burns were pretty superficial...”

Remus looks at him.

“ _And I didn’t do it_ ,” he finishes. “He did it himself.” He says it shamefacedly, Remus thinks. Remus’s mouth is dry, and his head hurts. Sirius is surrounded by a few books that had survived Remus’s purge of Peter’s adventure tales by being left in here instead of the library, and paperwork that was never filed or bound, that is in no order at all, that means nothing. When they’d first made it into the room he’d been full of manic energy, but now --

“Let’s have some tea,” Remus says. The “If I find out you’re lying to me I’ll throw you into space,” went without saying.

\---

“Look at this place,” Sirius says, with undisguised longing, as Remus pulls up a stool and puts cups and a big steaming pot of tea on the table in front of them. He looks up at the ceiling, and then towards the door. “I keep thinking,” Sirius says, and then he swallows loudly. “I keep imagining that James is going to just walk in. How can you stand it?”

The kitchen does gleam. A strong, snowy white. It looks new. It looks the same. It even smells the same -- that is to say, it smells of nothing. An unnerving quality in a kitchen.

Remus sighs. “I did leave for a while, you know,” he says. “I went back to earth, I mean. But my parents are both dead -- my dad had just died -- and I don’t have anyone else. Once the novelty wore off that I was a returned astronaut...” he trails off and pours them both a cup before he continues. “I was just an underemployed person who used to do something cool. And it was also as if --” he takes a long sip of his tea as he works out how to word it. “It was also as if being back on earth made everything here seem less real. It was like -- I couldn’t remember James and Lily anymore. Like it hadn’t happened. And then I heard that the crew who relieved me were going to be moved, and that command were trying to decide whether to appoint a caretaker or whether to decommission it...”

Sirius nods.

“I remember it all very vividly,” Remus admits. He looks at Sirius for too long, and then looks away. “It’s probably not healthy... but, well.”

Sirius takes a deep breath. “I think the burns you got from the flare were worse than Peter’s,” he says, as if he could possibly have seen them. Did -- did he leave afterwards? Was Remus lying there in the clinic, burned and alone, and then Peter took Sirius away to finish the job, finish destroying them all? Is that why Remus doesn’t remember them leaving? Are his memories of that time, so jumbled, always -- wrong? So incomplete. “You know he had me locked up the whole way? Shackled. Time of his life. Of course when we landed he put on this big show of being at death’s door -- tore his wounds open again, would have served him right if they’d got infected and died.”

“Why didn’t you tell them the truth?” Remus says.

“They wouldn’t have believed me,” Sirius says. “I hadn’t slept for days. Every time I tried I saw them.” His voice cracks but his face doesn’t change. “I didn’t do it, but I’m as bad for not saving them. For not seeing -- that was my job. My job was to see it. To see off threats. If I can -- if I --”

Remus thinks about Peter telling him to bomb the ship out of space, into oblivion, into death. He thinks about the look on Sirius’s face that day, as Peter cried that Sirius had done it, he’d killed them, Sirius, how could you -- the look that he couldn’t reconcile with Sirius’s lack of response, and bitter laughter as he was tied up. More memories that he can’t slot into place -- the whole loop of time has come undone there. It’s too painful. It’s a cyclone.

He thinks about mornings drinking tea, like this -- on the early shift together, ready to go and make sure the station remained functional and safe. “James takes care of all the science stuff and the research and navigation,” Sirius said, when Remus once asked him why he was so interested in the mechanics of the ship. “I want to know this.” He’d said it so forcefully that Remus hadn’t really known what to say.

Finally, he’d settled on, “I just thought, since you came joint top and have such a strong theoretical background --” but Sirius had waved him away.

“My parents wanted me to go into the sciences,” he’d said. “I did -- and then I decided I wanted to go to space. So I did. Not their goal for me -- they’d be happier if I was on track to be a professor at Oxford or Cambridge... but I just wanted to come here to come here. Is that bad? The research is great, everything we’re doing is great. But I just wanted to go somewhere new.”

“Ah,” Remus had said, as dry as he could manage. “An aristocratic youth on his grand tour.”

Sirius knocked his arm. “Hey,” he said. “Grander than most, at least. You’ve got to give me that.”

Remus thinks about other things. He thinks about all of the times he saw Sirius with James and Lily, laughing over some stupid joke. He thinks about the freeze dried flowers Sirius had packed and then filled James’s room with a month in, when Lily had agreed to be his girlfriend. He thinks about Sirius very solemnly taking responsibility for errors that were not his fault, because he was second in the chain of command, and he should have caught it. He thinks about Sirius’s hands on his face, gently, gently, holding him there, close, warm, when Remus had thought he was about to die and nobody was going to come --

Remus swirls his cup of tea and drinks the last of it. He looks over at Sirius, who is treating his own cup slightly as if it’s an alien object. “Sirius,” he says. “I believe you.” He reaches over and grabs his hand. “Hi,” he says. “Sirius, I believe you.”

Sirius lets out a long, long breath, and says nothing.

Remus gets up and walks around the table until he’s at Sirius’s side. Sirius looks up at him, and still says nothing. Remus slowly moves to hug him. Sirius doesn’t object, doesn’t say anything, so Remus wraps his arms around him, holds him, and after a few long moments, Sirius reaches up and holds him back. “I’m sorry,” Remus says. He repeats it again and again. They stay like that for a long time.

\---

All of the memories hurt. But after a while -- after a long while -- it hurts more not to remember.

There was the day the artigrav stopped working in the middle of Alice’s work on a very complicated chart, and she’d been so furious even though there was nothing Remus could have done to prevent it, and he’d fixed it as soon as he could. Sirius had been completely useless, had delighted at being practically without gravity while Remus had struggled to get the generator working again. “You’re making me want to throw up,” he’d said, as Sirius tried to do some space acrobatics. But when Sirius had looked contrite and started to leave -- well. “Oh, stay,” he’d said. “Just try not to be _too brilliant_ while I’m fixing this, will you?”

It’s probably always the case, Remus thinks, that small things that happen -- maybe even things that annoy you at the time -- come to stand for the larger whole. _This is what we used to do. This was my life._ And he misses that moment, but it’s also that he misses that time. The sense of possibility.

Remus makes them both a very big portion of noodles. “Oh my God,” Sirius says, and it’s like they’re back, back, thirteen years ago, it’s like he never left. “These are so unsatisfying. I forgot that. Lord. I want to be able to chew these noodles, and I can’t.” Remus ducks his head down, and doesn’t know how to laugh, not with this Sirius, this new-old version of him. But he smiles.

“You should be grateful that I didn’t use any of what Food and Hygiene thinks counts as fish sauce,” he says. “Do you remember --”

“Of course I do,” Sirius says, and he doesn’t sound so young now. There’s an edge to his voice, but he’s still smiling. “I stand by what I always said -- don’t trust an organisation that merges their food and hygiene departments together. The same people decided on our toilets and our rations. They’re to blame for this.”

Remus is at the end of his noodles when Sirius tips his head back and says “What are we going to do.” He doesn’t intone it as a question. What can they do? Sirius hasn’t said as much but Remus would bet that this is part of an ill-conceived prison break, and that he was not let go. What is there to do, Remus thinks. Will they come for him?

\---

The nursery looks even better than it did thirteen years ago. The rest of the station may be showing its age, but here there are now fully-grown trees, thickets, so many bushes with so many types of flower... when they’d first started, it had been little more than a greenhouse.

“It’s a forest,” Sirius says, but Remus shakes his head.

“No birds,” he says, wistfully. He’d always argued against bringing any animals out here. But he misses birds. He misses the ambient noise of nature. There aren’t any slugs eating his leaves and there are no rabbits eating the root vegetables he grows for when he can be bothered to try and cook fresh -- but there are no birds, no tiny fieldmice, no hedgehogs.

Sirius does a complicated thing with his mouth and a finger and imitates a kind of bird cry that Remus doesn’t recognise, but watching it makes him flush. Slightly, slightly. Sirius repeats it. Remus doesn’t know what to say. “You’re full of surprises today,” he says.

\---

In the future:

“I can’t hide this from them forever,” Remus will say. “What if they send a new crew?”

“I think they know I’m here,” Sirius will say. “And as long as you don’t tell them about it, Peter doesn’t care.”

“One day,” Remus starts.

“One day we’ll destroy him,” Sirius says.

“But not yet.” Remus says, and tugs on a loose lock of Sirius’s hair. “We deserve some time, first. We deserve some time here. For us.”

\---

That first night, day, sleep -- because time has lost all meaning, except as a way to track Sirius, how long Sirius has been here -- when they are too tired to stay awake, when they are too tired to talk, Sirius makes for his old room. “No,” Remus says, and cautiously touches his arm. He then tries again. “If -- if you’d rather?” And he indicates his own room, his own little bed.

They’re both smaller than they were thirteen years ago. There’s room for both of them. And yet. That’s not what Remus wants. He hooks an arm around Sirius, and breathes, and breathes. “Do you remember the time I pushed you out of bed,” he says, lightly.

“Yes,” Sirius says.

“I didn’t mean it,” Remus says. “I thought I did. And then I spent a long time trying to work out what you meant by it.”

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Sirius says. “I was scared that you were dead. I loved you.”

He doesn’t say it like he’s confessing anything. It’s been such a long, long time. Remus presses his nose into Sirius’s long hair, feathered through with white streaks. Remus crops his hair shorter than he used to, but he knows he’s going grey too., he thinks, ruefully. He spent the better part of his youth up here, in space, without even any birds for company.

“Ah,” Remus says. “Yes, not anything.”

\---

Sirius stays. “Lay low,” Remus says. “I’ll make them think I did blow you up.” He types a few elliptical messages to Peter the next day and thinks -- either he believes me or he doesn’t.

Remus forgot that it was different again having one other person there, and not a whole crew. He realises his loneliness -- he is allowed to give his loneliness a body, a name, now that he has someone else. And Sirius, he’s sure, has been even more lonely than he was -- court-martialled, locked up for killing his best friends, for sabotaging the mission, when he did no such thing.

“My mother was allowed to visit me once,” he says to Remus over cereal. “She told me that they were disowning me. That if I was ever let out, I should stay away.” He pulls a face. “I didn’t think I was ever getting out, and I didn’t want to go back to them. I came to space, I -- I put the better part of a galaxy between me and them. And then I was back, cowing in front of her...”

“I’m sorry,” Remus says. There’s not much else he can say. He tugs on Sirius’s sleeve; they have been sleeping together at night, just sleeping, curled up together, but otherwise he’s still -- touching is difficult, different. “Hey. You’re free now.”

“Free,” Sirius says.

“Yeah,” Remus says. “Come on.”

He makes Sirius put on a spacesuit. He makes himself put on a spacesuit. “Is this safe,” Sirius asks, although he doesn’t sound particularly convinced that he needs to hear the answer.

“I massively overhauled the whole system after the time I, you know,” Remus says. “The station can haul us back in. Delicately. You’d be surprised.”

He takes Sirius to a big flat part of the station’s roof, as far away from the station’s lights as he can get. “It’s on a rotation,” he says. The comms are loud and strong, so he knows it’s like he’s yelling directly into his ear. “In a few minutes, the lights out here will go off. They should be off for long enough for us to get a good view. Then they’ll come back, and we can go inside for gravity and dinner.”

“Okay,” Sirius says, and he grasps Remus’s hand as best as they can through the spacesuits.

None of the stars they can see here have names. Or, if they have names, Remus doesn’t know them. None of them are Sirius, who is star, name, person. Other things. Remus can never make out constellations -- it feels like a waste that they sent him out here. He cares more about the station than about space, than about the stars, or distant planets... he just wants to keep it running, wants to keep inhabiting the last place he was happy, the last place his friends ever knew. Wants to stay in the place he thinks of as home. He might as well be living alone on a remote farm on a Scottish island. But at least then there would be birds.

“Look at them,” Sirius says. It’s so dark, and then so bright. “So far away.”

Remus is looking at Sirius, instead of the stars. He can barely make him out inside the suit, and yet. Here he is. He can’t believe it, he still can’t.

Later, when Sirius takes his helmet off, slowly, unused to the mechanics of the suit, Remus says -- “Can I?” and Sirius says _yes_ , and instead of helping Sirius off with the rest of the suit he leans in and kisses him, softly. Sirius grips his arm -- Remus is out of his suit, and in the silly clothes he always wears underneath. “What?” Remus says, and takes a step back. Sirius doesn’t let go.

“Help me,” Sirius says, through gritted teeth. “I don’t know how to get this thing off.”

“As if, Sirius Black, you haven’t taken my suit off me multiple times before,” Remus says, and neither of them mentions the gap in time, the many years apart. As if he’s always been there. Remus carefully helps him off with it, and then they’re -- both standing there, by the airlock, in underclothes. Sirius rests his head on Remus’s shoulder.

“I can’t hide this from them forever,” Remus says, then. And what goes unspoken, but what they both understand is -- he wants to. He wants to hide it from them, forever.

\---

Some days are worse than others. It’s always been that way. There are days when Remus can’t get out of bed; there are more days than that when Sirius can’t. Sometimes they lie, awake, tangled in each other, and don’t move until hours have passed and they need to piss.

Remus has been working on the computer system, with an eye to eventually overhauling messaging, when he stumbles across Sirius taking an early lunch out of the kitchen. “I was going to sit in James’s room,” he says. “Come with me.” Remus goes. The room -- is as he remembers it. As it always has been. He tries not to think about it too much, usually. Sirius touches things, picks them up to look at them -- moves them around. But gently, reverently. As if James was going to come back, and wouldn’t mind Sirius poking around in his things, because he never had before.

“Walking into you, after I’d just got out of the ship --” Sirius says. “I thought for a moment that I’d somehow travelled back through time. That I’d got back here before... that I was going to be able to stop it all from happening.”

“Sirius,” Remus says. Sirius shakes his head.

“I know, I know. I know it’s not how anything works. But...”

Remus smiles ruefully. “And then you saw that I was old and alone.”

Sirius doesn’t dignify that with a direct response. “I came to my senses... you know, I had no idea if you’d even survived. Not until then. Nobody would tell me, and you looked like such a wreck... they were pulling your suit off you when I was taken away...”

 _Oh_. “Oh,” Remus says, hollowly. “Yes,” he says. “Well, you’ve seen the scars...” (he had, and in great detail) “... but otherwise I’m all here and present. Just missing some of the skin on the left hand-side of my body. And sometimes it itches.

\---

“Please remember,” Remus says to Sirius, one day, over shitty wine they’d found buried in the food stores, wine that they suspected that James had smuggled onboard to present to Lily on a special occasion. “That this is something that happened to you. That you did not make it happen.”

It’s something he repeats, often. It’s something he has had to tell himself. It’s something he has to talk to Sirius about, at some point, in more detail. It’s -- he thinks. Should I have been more suspicious? Should I have known Peter was the one? Because he’d spent all those years trying to make the puzzle pieces fit, trying to hammer everything into place. But he couldn’t see it -- he couldn’t see that there was another scenario entirely. He couldn’t work out that the story was so wrong that he had to start over.

“I don’t know how Lily and James would have felt about us staying out here. Hiding.” Sirius says. Remus would protest -- he wasn’t hiding, he was never hiding before -- but he thinks it’s true now. Now that Sirius is here.

“They’d call us cowards,” Remus says. “But it doesn’t have to be forever, you know?” He thinks of Lily’s birthday party, the first party on the station, and smiles to himself. “Remember how late Lily wanted to stay up dancing, that first party,” he says. “How we made James be the one to tell her that regs only allowed it go on until 11, and she just flat-out told him to move us to another time-zone.”

“Yes,” Sirius says. “Of course.”

“I think she’d understand that we need some time,” Remus says. He’s had more than a decade to grieve, but now -- there are other things he needs to do. Sirius is here, and he needs to help him, and he also needs to work out what their lives can be. He needs to be close and far away at the same time. He brushes an eyelash off Sirius’s cheek, and tells him to make a wish.

“You would write her a letter,” Remus adds. “I did that -- I wrote -- I wrote you all a lot of letters.”

“She’s dead,” Sirius says.

“She’s a long way away,” Remus says. “In time. She’s a long time away. But you travelled how many lightyears to make it back to me?” He looks at all of James’s things. He focuses on the cuddly toy stuffed between the pillow and the wall, as if to hide it. A teddy bear, with a perpetually surprised expression and a drooping nose.

“Look,” Remus says, and gestures towards it. “They were just here. They’re so far away, but they were just here. We’re only separated by time. I think it’s okay for us to spend a while thinking about them, wanting to talk to them. I think it’s okay to write to them. We probably won’t hear back, but you never know. Time is just distance to be covered.”

Sirius gives him a small smile.

“It’s okay to just live,” Remus says, and he’s telling himself that too. He looks at Sirius, who is so small, and who has seen so many, many bad things. He looks at Sirius, who found him again. Suspended in time. That’s how Remus feels; or, like he’s a dreamer finally awoken. The castle was frozen around him, and it was only outside -- outside, out there, all of the rushing, dark, glowing universe -- that moved on.

“You waited for me,” Sirius says, once, gleefully. “You could tell I’d be back.”

Remus rolled his eyes. “No,” he says.

“You didn’t _know_ ,” Sirius says. “Idiot. But you felt it.”

“No,” Remus says, and grins.

\---

“Oh my god, look at this,” James said. “Is this the library? Why’s it so big?”

“It’s going to have all of our books in it,” Lily said. “Come on Remus, tell him.”

“I don’t need any books,” Remus said. “Um.” He was inspecting the wiring.

Lily rolled her eyes. “Remus reads about three books a week. If you don’t have an adequate supply of Dorothy L. Sayers and Alan Hollinghurst books he’ll make us go back for them.”

“But that’s --” Remus paused. “I thought the library was just for manuals and scientific research,” he said.

“Remus,” Lily said, gently. “We’re going to have to live there. Here. Bring the things you need to make it liveable first, and then worry about what we need for research.”

And then Sirius appeared from nowhere and barreled into James, and he said -- “I can’t believe it’s really happening, I can’t believe we’re going to do it.”

And James said, “I can. Are you scared, Black?”

“No,” Sirius said. “I can’t wait to get up there.”

“Don’t wish your time here away.” Lily said. “It’ll come sooner than you think.”


End file.
